Ouya: The $99, Android-Powered TV Game Console

Ouya games will all have a free trial mode or be free to play, the company says.

Adam Saltsman will bring his game Canabalt to Ouya.

Ouya says the console will be fully hackable, allowing users to take it apart and modify it easily without voiding the warranty.

Ouya founder Julie Uhrman calls the gamepad, which features a touch panel, the "Stradivarius of controllers."

Ouya's logo.

The "Home Screen" for the Ouya version of Canabalt.

Playing a shooting game on Ouya.

TV videogames are due for a disruption. Is a $99 console called Ouya the device that could do it?

It wasn’t that long ago that the vast majority of portable videogames were purchased much like console games, on a disc or cartridge for $30-40 each. Smartphones have since thoroughly disrupted that market, giving gamers an array of portable devices that play games with an upfront cost of either 99 cents or nothing at all, with much of that money being funneled directly into developers’ pockets.

Now that Apple’s crazy idea has become established wisdom, it would seem to make sense that a similar business model could work for television games, doing to the Xbox and Wii what iPhone did to the Nintendo DS. But although rumors have long been swirling about an updated Apple TV box that would introduce 99-cent apps to the living room, nothing has materialized yet. This, at least for the time being, leaves the playing field wide open.

Enter Ouya, a startup founded by Julie Uhrman, the former head of IGN’s digital distribution business and who has also held executive positions at GameFly and Vivendi Universal. The company says it plans to launch an eponymous gaming console, for which it will launch a Kickstarter drive on Tuesday, that brings the smartphone paradigm to living-room gaming. The $99 Ouya is built on the Android platform, will allow developers to easily create and sell their games and be fully “hackable” — anyone will be able to pull the machine apart and tinker with it to their heart’s content.

Ouya expects to ship the first boxes in March 2013.

“I grew up playing games on TV, and I wasn’t along in feeling that the game industry is experiencing a brain drain,” Uhrman told Wired in advance of Tuesday’s announcements. “Developers are leaving triple-A shops and going to mobile, and we feel that’s a shame.”

Integrated custom game store — find and download games (and other apps)

Includes SDK for game development

Ability to root device without voiding warranty

“The money is in the living room,” Uhrman said. “Three out of every 4 dollars are spent on TV [games].”

Ouya’s cubic design and game controller were created by Yves Behar, designer of the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop. The box packs a four-core Tegra 3 processor and 1 GB of RAM.

The controller looks like a standard Xbox 360 pad with a touchpad, which Uhrman says will allow touch-controlled mobile games to be ported to Ouya more easily.

Although Uhrman has secured funding from many private investors, Ouya is attempting to make a splash with a campaign on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. It has set a lofty goal of just shy of one million dollars, which it says will be spent on the development of the hardware and software, producing the first Ouya machines and funding the development of early games.

Uhrman says that every game developed for Ouya must either be free-to-play or have a free trial version. Thirty percent of revenue will go to Ouya, the rest to the developer.

Ouya has recruited a handful of independent game designers to sing its praises before the launch, giving a little bit of street cred to an otherwise nebulous project.

“I’m excited for Ouya,” said Journey creator Jenova Chen in a statement. “I am a firm believer that there is always room to challenge the status quo.”

Other indie devs on board with Ouya include Markus “Notch” Persson of Minecraft fame, Canabalt designer Adam Saltsman and inXile Entertainment’s Brian Fargo. The company says that every Ouya box sold includes a software development kit at no extra cost. The console and controller will even use standard screws so that they can easily be pulled apart, examined and tweaked.

Everything sounds good on paper. But can it work?

Getting into the game console business has generally been a Sisyphean task for startups. The only two companies that have had any success at it since the formative days of the videogame industry have been Sony and Microsoft, established technology giants willing to burn billions just to get a foothold.

Ouya might well be correct that the App Store model is what television games have been waiting for. But even if it has read the tea leaves correctly, it’s also possible that Apple or another major player is preparing a product that will grab all of the mindshare that Ouya is hoping to gather for its project.

The reason that game developers can get rich selling iOS games for a dollar is that they’re selling to a massive userbase, something Ouya doesn’t have. Apple was able to sell iPhones because people need phones, but nobody needs another game console under the TV.

Then again, it’s not as if Ouya is starting entirely from zero. By basing its console on the Android OS, it makes it easy for a wide range of developers to port games to the platform.

The biggest reason that previous attempts at breaking the dominant paradigm of the home game console business have flopped is that they were fighting against established players like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Ouya, if it positions its product correctly, isn’t really competing against any of them. They don’t have to fail for Ouya to carve out a modest success. There’s no $99 game machine on the market today, not even Wii, and nothing with an App Store-style ecosystem.

It’s quite likely that something like Ouya will soon enough be ubiquitous in our living rooms. Whether or not it’ll be Ouya is anyone’s guess.

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